Implantable medical devices (IMDs) such as cardiac pacemakers, cardioverters and defibrillators (ICDs), hemodynamic monitors, and drug delivery devices, are being offered with increasing capacity for storing physiological and device performance data. Physiological sensors for monitoring various patient conditions such as heart rhythm, blood pressure, respiration, patient activity level, heart wall motion, and blood chemistry may operate in conjunction with an IMD and home based instrumentation for acquiring continuous or periodic physiological data for processing and/or storage by the IMD or for clinical management. Such data may be used by the IMD in automated therapy delivery or by a clinician in diagnosing or monitoring a patient condition and in therapy management.
The development of remote patient monitoring systems allow IMD data to be transferred from the patient's IMD to a home monitor and from the home monitor to a central database so that the data may be reviewed by a clinician without requiring the patient to be present. However, a patient may visit various specialists or other clinicians not associated with the device follow-up clinic. Data stored by the IMD may be useful to such clinicians in combination with information they obtain during an office visit, such as results from physical examination, laboratory tests or patient interview. However, the specialist or other clinician may not have direct access to the central database storing the remote IMD monitoring data. The data in the central database may not be updated at the time the patient is visiting the specialist or other clinician. Therefore it is desirable for a clinician, who may not be affiliated with the IMD follow-up clinic, to be able to gain access to stored IMD data. Clinicians could provide better patient care by having IMD data at hand when evaluating an IMD patient. Since patients having IMDs may be seen at numerous medical care locations, providing a programmer at each facility may not be economically feasible. Furthermore, placement of an IMD programmer in the many facilities that may see IMD patients places training burden on clinicians who may only occasionally see patients having IMDs. What is needed is a system for accessing data from the IMD where the format and content of the provided information can be customized to each facility based on the medical specialty and type of patient assessment to be performed.